How to Connect a Second Salesforce Account to your Marketo Instance

You have Marketo integrated with your Salesforce account --- but now you have a need to integrate Marketo with a second Salesforce account. Maybe you acquired a business, or are looking to consolidate marketing across multiple sales teams using different Salesforce accounts.

What are your options, and what’s the simplest way to address this challenge?

The first thing to deal with is how Marketo’s native Salesforce integration, that you are already using, impacts Marketo’s API. It’s far from an ideal situation. Once the Marketo-Salesforce native connector is enabled in your Marketo instance, the Marketo API is permanently “locked down” such that the only endpoint that can be access - by anyone or anything (a programmer, an integration software) -- is the Marketo lead record (aka contact aka person).

This means that unless you undergo a painful and probably costly “instance migration” to move to a fresh Marketo instance, this will be the only object that you are able to sync to any other applications using the Marketo API.

That said, there is still a good amount you can accomplish by just using this object. You’ll still be able to:

Sync in leads and contacts from the second Salesforce into Marketo - so you can market to these contacts using Marketo

Sync leads (probably, qualified leads) from Marketo to the second Salesforce instance

Bring back updates on these leads, to ensure there is a feedback loop back to Marketo on these leads

Bi-directionally sync updates so that Marketo and the second Salesforce database (leads & contacts) remain in sync

These are the specific steps you can take via Bedrock Data to set this up, after you’ve signed up with Bedrock Data. (Note for a Bedrock Data engagement the below process is supported through the standard Bedrock Data on-boarding process).

This is going to be the rule that drives which of the Marketo leads sync to the second Salesforce. Since the second Salesforce is dealing with a subset of your Marketo data, there might be a Region or Product field that identifies these, along with reaching a qualified stage where you want to surface them to your sales team in Salesforce.

So the Sync Workflow then may be something like Sync the Marketo Lead to Salesforce, when Product Line = XXX and Revenue Stage = Marketing Qualified.

Once these records sync to Salesforce, they will match to existing Salesforce records by email address (no duplicates), or create a new lead record in Salesforce if not found - and sync over any mapped fields. And from that point remain in sync bi-directionallly.

Bedrock is a true bi-directional sync, so records can be created in either direction. So you’ll also want to consider if you want to sync ALL Salesforce leads & contacts to Marketo - which would also sync new Salesforce leads or contacts to Marketo, or if you want to apply a rule to restrict which specific records sync.

Step 5: Setup your System of Record rules.

Part of the bi-directional sync rules are also controlling the behavior for how records update back and forth, once these contacts exist in both Marketo & Salesforce. For each field mapping, you have a setting to drive how you want the bi-directional sync to behave for updates, from these options:

Most Recent Update: Sync updates from either system back & forth

System of Record = Marketo: Marketo in control of this field, not overwritten by Salesforce. This makes sense for Marketo controlled fields such as perhaps lead score or lead source.

System of Record = Salesforce: Salesforce in control of this field, not overwritten by Marketo. This makes sense for fields that you want to ensure Marketo does not overwrite Salesforce data.

And once live the bi-directional data sync is updated, automatically syncing & updating every five minutes.

The good news here is what otherwise could have been a very challenging situation, can be solved quickly with this approach. Salesforce 2 is now part of your Marketo universe, without having to adjust anything around the Marketo-Salesforce 1 sync.